Ensemble Methods for Multilayer Feedforward

摘要

Training an ensemble of networks is an interesting way to improve the performance with respect to a single network. However there are several method to construct the ensemble and there are no results showing which one could be the most appropriate. In this paper we present a comparison of eleven different method. We have trained ensembles of a reduced number of networks (3 and 9) because in this case the computational cost is not high and the method is suitable for applications. The results show that the improvement in performance from three to nine networks is marginal. Also the improvement of performance of the different methods with respect to a simple ensemble is usually less than 1%.